The Hindu Business Line : Sad tales from Vrindavan

Tapasi is a human being and her story can be best said if it is human. The only moments Tapasi is left alone to wheel her imagination are when she is in school or at home. She never has anyone for company. Only misery tap dances with her.

Doing the textiles beat long years ago, one met private and government officials regularly making annual trips to Vrindavan. It was a part of their calendar.

My friends talked of the loud prayers to Lord Krishna and the relief (from a life spent trading in cotton) they experienced.

"Vrindavan, Mathura, Benares hamare punya bhoomi ke tilak hain. Ye nahin hote, tho Hindustan nahin hota (Vrindavan, Mathura, Benares are the bright spots of sacred India. Without them there would be no Hindustan)."

Those were the words of an official (more a friend), who was working in a private cotton trading outfit. Never did anyone mention the abandoned old and young widows, mostly from West Bengal, dumped like rubbish in Vrindavan.

Kusum Ansal has crafted a sad tale based on the wasted widows of Vrindavan in Hindi, which has been translated into English by Masooma Ali under the title The Widow of Vrindavan.

The book is something between a documentary and the telling of the real life of a young widow, Tapasi Majumdar; or it could be a mix.

This writer has not read a book in recent times without a dot of hope as Tapasi swivels from one misery to another till one day she is found dead in Howrah Station.

"Tapasi felt herself beginning to fade out. She could see a bridge of light beckoning her, she could feel her soul spiral into space. "Whose corpse is this? Any idea? There's no identification. Tapasi's blood soaked body lay covered with a newspaper." Kusum Ansal has walked the streets of Vrindavan, where myths have it that Lord Krishna spent time with gopis. Today widows, "mistreated, tortured, starved and sold," spend time "doing 12-hour jaaps, subsisting on two rotis a day, shaven, shorn, abused and made sub-human," and Lord Krishna does not bother.

The lines of P. Lal, translating parts of the Rig Veda, seem more to the point: "Father of the earth,/protect us; Father of the sky,/protect us; Father of the great and shining waters,/protect us,/ To which God shall we offer our worship?"

There is no ambiguity in Kusum. She states her case firmly without flaunting political and social theories.

Tapasi is a human being and her story can be best said if it is human.

From the day her mother left her to plod the streets, Tapasi wanted to study at Tagore's Vishwa Bharati, which never happens.

In parts, Kusum is lyrical, like the waters in the pukurs (ponds) of rural Bengal nudged by the morning air. The only moments Tapasi is left alone to wheel her imagination are when she is in school or at home.

She never has anyone for company. Only misery tap dances with her. One read many times the bullock-cart scene.

"Someone had abandoned an old broken-down bullock cart outside the fence of Rakhal's house. Tapasi would stand and observe it quietly on her way to and from school.

"She couldn't help feeling the bullock cart wanted her to adopt it. One afternoon, with the help of Jatin Da's servant, Bholanath, she managed to push it inside her compound and install it under the banyan tree.

"Bholanath provided her with rope, reeds and straw with which she excitedly repaired and decorated the cart. Up until then, the only companion of her solitude was the banyan tree in the compound.

"The sun and shade peeking through its aerial roots and overhanging branches had formed the backdrop to all her pretend-play about imagined good and bad characters - brave kings who bound the bad guys with the roots and then flogged them, for instance.

"At other times she enjoyed swinging on the roots and reciting poems learned at school, or the Baul songs she had heard at Jatin Da's house. It was wonderful to sit there during the rains but sometimes at night the tree assumed a menacing shape, which though it made her a little anxious never seriously frightened her."

In one place, Jatin Das, who probably sells Tapasi into marriage, exclaims in Bengali: "Manusher monchay manusheri mon (The human heart longs for human intimacy)."

Tapasi longed for it but never came near it. Perhaps, animals are better placed than human beings; possibly they are more human.

It may not be acceptable to many but confirmation can be had by reading Jane Goodall's book, Through a Window: Thirty years with the chimpanzees of Gombe. One read the two books at the same time.

By any measure the chimpanzees in Gombe are more civilised than the humans crowding Tapasi.

They have bouts of moodiness and anger but they are not cruel going by the observations of this species over more than 30 years.

Jane puts across the point best: "We are, indeed, a complex and endlessly fascinating species. We carry in our genes, handed down from our distant past, deep-rooted aggressive tendencies. Our patterns of aggression are little changed from those that we see in chimpanzees.

"But while chimpanzees have, to some extent, an awareness of the pain, which they may inflict on their victims, only we, I believe, are capable of real cruelty — the deliberate infliction of physical or mental pain on living creatures despite, or even because of, our precise understanding of the suffering involved. Only we are capable of torture. Only we, surely, are capable of evil."

Priests and other assorted humans clamp down on Tapasi.

The story of a sick Mel being helped by Gigi, a female chimpanzee, is getting harder to come by in human societies.

One prefers to go along with Jane as in the animal world there have been no mass killings — a regular feature of human societies. Possibly (or is it surely), animals are more decent than humans.

P. Devarajan

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